Big DIY: The Year the Maker Movement Broke

About a year ago, I wrote a weekly post at Wired‘s Gadget Lab called “DIY Friday.” The first story was about MintyBoost, a USB charger made from AA batteries and an Altoids tin, devised by Adafruit’s Limor Fried. That was what DIY/maker hardware news mostly looked like in the last week of August 2010.

MakerFaire Detroit, sponsored by Ford, Pepsi and Microsoft as well as Etsy, Boing Boing and O’Reilly, gently wound down after officially closing July 31, featuring everything from giant Halloween displays to sewing tutorials to tiny children on crazy leaf-blower go-karts. I wish I’d been there.

GE launched a Facebook campaign targeting DIY makers to share designs for model aircraft and an airport, using 3D printers from the revered independent MakerBot.

MakerBot got some more competition in the field of inexpensive, easy-to-build-and-use home 3D printers: Ponoko featured the UP! printer on their blog (which comes helpfully pre-assembled), while MAKE featured Ultimaker, which touts its speed. “This is what happens when you do something that’s successful,” MakerBot’s Bre Pettis said. “Other people figure it out, too, and start businesses. More 3D printers are good.”

What you can now see emerging are several vertically-integrated “making chains”, which go from authoring tools to design houses to service bureaus to communities to 3D printers — all aimed at the new consumer/Maker side of the business.

Culturally, it’s mostly already happened — just like Hüsker Dü and The Pixies figured out Nirvana’s basic hard-rock punk-pop template years before. Only now, the business and commercial components are catching up in a big way.

Here are just a few more touchstones from the last twelve months:

Microchip designer ARM’s mbed project offers users an inexpensive microcontroller and a drag-and-drop compiler for simple hardware computing. It isn’t open-source, but like the new generation of Arduino boards, it’s comparatively easy for novices to use.

Amir Abo-Shaeer, a Santa Barbara high school teacher, wins a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in robotics and engineering education. Abo-Shaeer’s just one part of an increased emphasis on DIY education in K-12, partly centered around the FIRST Robotics international high school competition. Kids, teens, parents and young women are increasingly among the most numerous and enthusiastic makers.

When Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor for Xbox goes on sale, the hardware hacking community almost immediately develops open-source drivers for the device. Microsoft initially appears to take a hard line against Open Kinect, then embraces it, eventually launching an official development kit for Windows. Users increasingly want to know how their commercial devices work and modify them for their own ends.

The maker community’s largely taken this infusion of attention and the money it brings in stride. Many in the Instructables community are cautiously optimistic about Autodesk’s purchase of the site, particularly those who hope extra resources might improve the site’s usability or offer better tools to make and share projects.

In general, there doesn’t seem to be many bitter cries of “newbie!” or “sellout!” here. People are more excited and interested to know what they will be able to do.

I interviewed Torrone by e-mail to ask him about broader changes in the maker community and commercial ecosystem. Like Sterling, he observed that the new “hero cult” around popular DIYers had changed the public perception of the industry.

“There are more pilot TV shows that feature makers,” Torrone said. “Self-organized maker faires are common now. Makers do not require MAKE to come to their town; they’ll do it on their own” — or companies like GE or Red Bull will sponsor them.

The size and scope of the business has changed, too: “Between MakerBot, Adafruit, MakerSHED and SparkFun, that’s well over tens of millions of revenue.” With dozens of other companies making millions of dollars each year, “it’s a real industry now.” And for small companies and single proprietors, crowdfunding companies like Kickstarter have “made it easier to bring ideas to life.”

“Americans are building things again,” reads a General Electric report. “From Makerbot to GE’s Ecomagination Challenge, an open source competition to find the best ideas in cleantech, opportunities abound today for anyone with the motivation and imagination to get their hands dirty and create things that can solve some of our biggest challenges.” It may be sweeping corporate PR, but it suggests some of the possibilities and stakes of what’s happening.

Adafruit’s Torrone predicts that any or all of the following may happen in the next year or so:

We’ll see more large companies embrace the maker movement, [through] acquisitions, sponsorships. More companies / tool makers [will] compete to get makers interested. (IBM really adopted open source; it will be a little like that.)

We will see a publicly held maker company.

We will see more VC money flow in to maker companies.

We will see political leaders visit places like tech shops or maker faires when they realize this movement is one our best hopes to fix the US economy and education system. (Will we see Obama at the next maker faire? We should. If not – whoever is running against him should [come].)

When I asked him whether this was a best-case or worst-case scenario, Torrone was coy: “This is the best case and worst case depending on how you look at it.” Either way, the future of the DIY maker movement is coming.